Digital Networking enables plenty of business opportunities. It helps to create sustainable business relationships and generate trust while positioning the brand’s image. When you are looking for better results, and you want to increase your marketing ROI it is crucial to understand your audience. Analyzing your clients’ behavior and knowing their motivations is the primary key to modern selling and marketing.
Executives and leadership teams now give high importance to examining prospects’ behavior, both in offline and online activities, to obtain a complete overview of their requirements and their needs. It is where social media platforms become your best allies to decipher your client while generating quality leads and higher engagement with targeted accounts.
There is a broad spectrum of offline activities to perform B2B marketing research. Networking usually results in significant benefits to the brand’s image and sales development. Obtaining useful feedback from influential people in your industry can help you gain visibility.
Online strategies, such as using social selling tools, symbolize a fundamental approach to modern firms. They have realized that one must obtain information about the sites frequently visited by sales prospects, and even analyze the conversations they are having to identify the problems and needs arising in their environment. As part of implementing an effective marketing strategy and communication, one must become a part of their online communities, acquire data about the target audience, and understand how patterns are developed.
While integrating both digital strategies and offline activities may represent an enduring challenge, so are the long-lasting benefits obtained from such investments, such as boosting the brand’s image and generating trust. In this article, we will look into some of the tools, tactics, and fundamental elements that will enhance a sustainable increase in your marketing ROI.
Social Selling and Lead Generation
Social selling strategies are especially useful to generate leads in the B2B world. Through social media platforms, you can listen and learn from your audience, then present yourself as a solution to a problem they are experiencing. You also generate conversations and build relationships with your potential clients, encouraging them to experience the broader range of benefits offered by your brand.
Social selling acts as a bridge to establish trustful relationships in the online world before taking the necessary step in offline events or other activities in which personal interactions and sales take place.
Social selling enables your company to reach new prospects and audiences that didn’t know you before, and to maintain your brand in the mind of consumers that already do. The use of digital tools like LinkedIn Advertising (applying the ‘insight tag’) or your insights from your CRM and marketing tools can help you to understand the traffic on your site and generate new leads by applying the right social selling strategy.
Although most social networks do not function as direct sales channels by themselves, they are undoubtedly essential to building the foundations for your marketing strategy and boosting the power of your brand. Professional social networks such as LinkedIn will help you disseminate specific content that will put you in the spotlight and will improve your online reputation.
LinkedIn profiles provide relevant information you can examine even before interacting with someone. Through LinkedIn, you can access information to establish a relationship with your potential customers and then built a whole network of contacts that will help you grow your business.
As a professional network in which more and more people are interacting and connecting to share their interests, LinkedIn is the best platform to carry out social selling for B2B firms, allowing you to perform a more targeted prospecting and to provide your brand with a professional marque.
Create your content calendar to gain visibility
According to our experience, creating a marketing calendar that includes online and offline activities is fundamental to achieving the desired visibility. Your interaction in different channels will serve as reinforcement and will give power to your message to reach the right people. Building an online reputation prepares the ground and opens new collaboration opportunities with other organizations when attending offline events, improving the results and benefits you can obtain. Combining digital strategies such as social selling with offline events is a great way to improve your marketing ROI.
Gain engagement by applying an ABM Strategy
Techniques such as Account-Based Marketing (ABM) help you to concentrate your efforts to attract specific companies that have a high probability of becoming your clients. By using this methodology, the sales and marketing departments can join efforts and work together towards reaching a common objective, which increases the probability of showing higher ROI.
Once you identify a prospect, you can share specific content for such an audience. For example, you may have insightful articles to explain their problems, answer doubts and offer solutions to concrete needs your prospects have. As you may already conclude, these content marketing activities go hand in hand with ABM. In our blog, we share more about the importance of account-based marketing as well as how to start applying it.
Use social platforms and skills to generate trust
Social Platforms are channels that help you to prove your experience in your field and position the values that represent you and your brand. Make sure you participate actively in conversations, debates, and discussions where you establish yourself as a strong leader in your industry. Leave useful information and help to solve problems. Optimize your professional brand online and make sure you show a corporate image committed to solving your prospect’s issues.
Furthermore, keep in mind that although B2B means “business to business”, the ultimate interaction is done between people. The humanistic approach remains the key element in modern sales to achieve trust. Social selling allows the creation of sustainable relationships from the beginning of the process in a much more subtle and professional manner that will lead to closing the sale.
The digital revolution has transformed marketing and sales and has placed social platforms as the primary channel to conduct a successful strategy. Executives and leadership teams are relying on social selling ROI even if it can be quite challenging to measure. A digital strategy combined with offline networking will improve the brand´s value and positioning.
A rising number of businesses are experiencing the benefits of Social Selling increasing their sales and surpassing their goals. If you would like to know more about the latest strategies and tools available for your business and keep up to date in the modern world of digital marketing and sales, do not hesitate to follow us on our LinkedIn page.
